Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Gaulle

De Gaulle delivers disagreement with the calm brutality of a bureaucratic stamp. The first sentence performs courtesy: he has "heard" you, he acknowledges you have "views", he even frames the conflict as a matter of harmony rather than right and wrong. Then he snaps the lid shut. "The decision is taken unanimously" is a masterpiece of controlled insult: unanimity isn’t presented as a consensus reached, but as a fact that erases the very conversation he just pretended to entertain.

The subtext is pure Gaullist statecraft. This is leadership as choreography, not deliberation. He stages consultation to preserve the dignity of the institution (and to signal he is not a despot), while making clear that dissent will not be allowed to register as dissent. Unanimity here is not democracy; it’s discipline. It implies that the collective voice has already been aligned, and if you’re out of tune, that’s your problem - you’re not part of the "we" that matters.

Contextually, it fits the de Gaulle persona forged in crisis: the wartime general who rebuilt legitimacy by embodying France, the president who distrusted party squabbling, the architect of a strong executive designed to cut through paralysis. The line works because it converts authority into rhetoric: a velvet glove over an iron proceduralism. You’re dismissed, but in perfect grammar, and with the nation’s orderliness as the weapon.